Agape
by Aiko Isari
Summary: [XW]They never understand why it chose him. Taiki doesn't remember.


**_A/N:_ **Hello, it is too late in the evening and I love it. This is for the Digimon non-flash bingo challenge, prompt number 10-favoritism. I've probably horrifically subverted it but whatever. It was a lot of fun and i enjoyed writing it. Not sure how much sense it makes though. Anyway, enjoy and let me know what you think. The title comes from C.S. Lewis' _The Four Loves._

Warnings: Character death, (non-graphic) descriptions of violence, possible swearing, multiple relationships referenced, time loops, etc

* * *

The first time, there is no D-5.

The first time, Taiki is five years old and he wais drowning in a gray sea because he doesn't know how to swim in nightmares. He dies in the teeth of creatures without faces and noses and he is screaming bubbles.

The second time, his brain makes sure he knows how to swim no matter what.

He makes it to the age of nine where his father throws him away from a passing car but he is still hit in the inevitable pileup.

He never quite gets over his caution over cars and streets and the reckless idea of driving. He can't take a bus anywhere.

The third time, he doesn't make it half as long. His heart is physically weak and gives out before the ambulance can save him.

That time is the time he remembers a gentle voice and warm embraces and he isn't actually scared.

The fourth time, Taiki just hopes to god he can graduate elementary school.

He comes close, within days, but then Tactimon arrives early and murders his class via making their trip bus crash. He gets about as far as screaming before he goes flying into a ditch.

He doesn't like to remember that one.

He doesn't know how to turn the resets off, never figured out how they turned on in the first place. All he knows is that by time number seventeen, he's managed more feats than most people his age, naturally figured out the way the little things work and lets himself focus on the bigger picture.

That's when he meets Norn, the consciousness of Yggdrasil. She tells him he is special.

He shivers. She smiles. She knows.

It's because he _hates_ it that he is special.

She tells him of other worlds, other dreams, other places full of despair. And one way or another they will call for him, they will ask for him. And he will answer. Because he loves them all.

He just hasn't remembered it yet.

He doesn't believe it until the ambulance in the nineteenth reset. He had assumed the siren going by meant he was doomed to go down in flames at seven. It had happened before, so why not now?

He had been wrong.

Taiki had never really recognized pain until then. The deaths had been gruesome but mostly forgotten in youth and still-forming memory centers.

This, he is able to remember, and even when he is forced to watch his mother's face as he dies, it is still the clearest vision he has and it's cruel.

He recognizes the world then. And recognizes just as much how deeply he loves it and how much he shouldn't.

But the love doesn't go away, no matter how many horrible scenes he watches, no matter how much his friends cry.

By the time he is thirteen and reaches the Digital World for the first time, Taiki recognizes his own fraility and decides not to die.

Except it happens anyway but he wakes to his reality at an older age than before and the time just keeps shrinking.

Fate either loves him or hates him and at this point, Taiki doesn't care because he still hasn't graduated middle school or saved the world and fulfilled enough people's dreams with them and he is still so very alone.

At some point, he just figures he's going to get it right and damn the consequences of his actions, even if he dies because maybe if he dies saving someone it will work out somehow.

Taiki takes the concept of happy ending and throws it away, and things get better.

When he meets Nene for the third time, he finds her attractive. By the sixth, she is pitiful and weak and he wants to hold her and never let go anyway. No matter how many times he sees Kiriha, he adores him and pities him and desires him in the same breath. Or maybe he sees them so much, knows them so well, that by the time he sees the Digital World gone to hell he wants them both and both of them together at the same time and it doesn't make sense.

But thankfully, they don't make sense and want him themselves in an awkward, childlike way that is like his and not because he's not sure he can be called a child when he remembers dying a lot for no reason other than because he's there. But he feels like a child anyway when they hug him together and hug each other and Kiriha cries for what he's lost and they hold each other and recognize that they are not just two hes and a she but a we and that doesn't change until Yuu is freed and pulls Taiki down with him like an anchor.

When he's struck in the heart, Taiki is scared to die. Because he will never know. He will never be able to save that one person, know that one reality and live to the point of adulthood where he is allowed to pursue them in earnest and grow up.

He doesn't want to reset. He wants to love the world and not reset and make it a few days more.

And he does.

Taiki sees the future and feels the Code Crown in his skin and it's warm like Norn's embraces every time dies and the smile on Yuu's face when he says he will not turn his back on his partner and he loves, loves, loves all three of them and is so very scared of that.

He makes it another year before he is stabbed in the stomach and that time he thinks is the end and it's not terrifying now because he's sure that everyone will have each other and that's all that matters.

Perhaps it's that that makes him wake up in his own body at the age of fourteen in a large amount of pain but alive. He is alive and he is safe and damn it, he's still loving someone.

Whoever it is doesn't matter because the resets stopped at a number beyond the double digits and that means for the first time, Fate is being kind enough to let it figure out himself without putting a new coin in the game machine.


End file.
